Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Buffy the Vampire Slayer is easily the best Science Fiction television programme ever made, and should be high on an all time list of great television of any genre. With a name like that though, and on the surface being about an extra from Beverly Hills 90210 who fights demons, it doesn't sound like it has a lot going for it. So what makes it so special that people have written entire theses about it? What is it that makes me re-watch my DVDs over and over again.

Buffy is science fiction as metaphor taken to the extreme. The best science fiction works as a metaphor for real life, Buffy took that as a basis for everything that happens in the show - and expanded to such an extent that almost every story has a resonance with reality. Some examples. In Buffy, the school (and later work) are literally hells on earth. Buffy worries about what will happen if she sleeps with her boyfriend, so he turns into an actual monster. Vampirism is a metaphor for burgeoning lust and desire, as early as episode 1 a previously nerdy character becomes a sauve, dark and desirable hunk simply by becoming one with the undead.

Such metaphors aren't just played out on a small scale. Entire seasons of the show are taken up by it. The third season (surely the best) is one long bubbling story about hidden identities and inner demons. A character is introduced who is effectively Buffy's alter-ego, other characters come face to face with their own inner demons (sometimes in a quite literal sense) and survive, thus proving to themselves that the teenage fears of inadequacy they harbour are unfounded. Each of the seasons are like this, with hidden depths like a novel, but each containing episodes which stand up by themselves.

Now if all this sounds a little twee or smug, I'm probably telling it wrong, because the story telling on Buffy the Vampire Slayer is almost always in the context of the over-arching plot and it never feels like a 'message' is being forced upon the audience. The trick to doing this appears to be in a liberal use of humour and mixing / breaking genres. Action scenes are sometimes undercut by a great evil being defeated easily while moments which should be portentous with doom are commonly played for silliness rather than gravity. Ultimately the series is more about the characters than the events, and when events are important, it's the impact that they have upon the lives of the characters that we care about the most.

Although the series is well-known for being 'teen', only the first three seasons are set in a school. The fourth and fifth revolve around a university while in the sixth Buffy has a job and in the seventh she takes on the responsibility of a mother. The entire series is effectively a story about growing up, with all the trials that this process entails being explored through the science fiction metaphor.

As if the stories weren't enough in itself, the series is extremely courageous in the way that these stories are told. One episode contains 25 minutes without dialogue, another is a musical, a third deals a character's inner struggle to prove himself - resulting in all the near-apocalyptic 'action' happening in scenes we never see. At the end of the fourth series the 'big finish' episode in which the bad guys are defeated is the penultimate show of the season, the final episode is an introspective dream sequence in which the main characters surreally reflect upon the journey they have taken over the last year - imagine them doing that in 24!

So anyway. Buffy the Vampire Slayer is the best Science Fiction television programme of all time - fact. If you know me and you want to watch it I will eagerly lend you my DVDs.